The Editor's Choice

by ELLERY SEDGWICK

1

LONG, long ago, when Germans were a decent people, one of them wrote a story familiar to my childhood. The Devil was abroad as usual, and as usual he took up with a man sorely in need of his help. I forget whether it was fame, fortune, or a pretty girl that he so urgently desired. At any rate, the man whispered his secret and the Devil was wholly accommodating. He would give all his friend asked. His return? Nothing but an unsubstantial trifle. With that the Devil stooped, as Devils do with special grace, and plucking one corner of the man’s shadow, made a neat roll of its whole length and walked jauntily away with the package beneath his arm. If the hero of this tale was an editor, when he lost his shadow he lost everything. For if one thing is more essential than the rest, it is that the editor’s shadow should rest squarely on his magazine.

Now a shadow is a very different thing from a reflection. It is its antithesis. All but the outline is gone, the intangible essence remains. It is characteristic as a man’s accent or the first crinkle of his smile.

When I was a boy I spent many holidays at an island camp. In the evenings a familiar amusement was to take a sheet of prepared paper, white on one side, black on the other. Each of the company was placed in turn beside a powerful lamp so that the profile fell sharply upon the white side of a sheet fixed firmly upon a screen. Then someone skilled with the pencil traced the outline with meticulous care. Next the shadow picture was cut out, reversed, and hung upon the line. No portrait can convey a more accurate impression of personality. If there is “character,” here is a graph of it. If not, you feel the absence in your marrowbones. To young men and women about to marry I suggest this pastime.

Coming back again to magazines, the editor’s shadow, essential as it is, must not be allowed to blacken the page. It need be but dimly in the background of the reader’s mind, but there it must be. Without it a magazine is but a hodgepodge packaged for commercial conveniences and that, as you and I well know, is just what most of them are.

So the first rule for editing is “Let your shadow fall full upon the page.”

And the second rule for editing a monthly magazine is never to forget that its life lasts just thirty days. In that brief span all its vitality must be compressed. Time carefully. Don’t print for eternity. Print for now.

There is no Rule Three.

I cannot put pen to paper discussing an editor’s task without thanking my lucky stars for the happiness it has given me through long decades. A gipsy once told me that the bright star Aldebaran was in the ascendant when I was born. That was the star, you will remember, which brought life and liberty to Quentin Durward’s outlandish friend Hayraddin Maugrabin. Certainly it brought luck to me. Think of being paid for fishing in the morning’s mail: a letter from a missionary’s wife in the Solomon Islands stranded among cannibal neighbors, while in a distant pasture her husband pursued an errant sheep no blacker than the rest but dearer perhaps to God and him; another from the Woman Homesteader in the bleak Northwest whose courage was tonic to the soul; still another giving a shrewd report of political breezes in Kansas where the Cagliostro of the hour was preaching the transplantation of goat glands as the sovereign remedy for physical infirmity, gaining thereby a fortune, immense and ardent support at the polls, and, incidentally, confirming the editor in his belief that the more furiously democratic education moves forward, the more resolutely it sticks in the same place.

A happy conglomerate for a working day!

A magazine editor has but one idea in his head — interest here and now. If interest is at white heat and the magazine hot off the press, the editor thinks as much about the future as the promoter, pocketing a profit on his deal, thinks about eternity. But the editor of an anthology has a longer responsibility. To permanence he can hardly aspire, but a degree of semipermanence is a practicable ideal, and that is his target. Interest fades with time. The bright new curtains you hang in your show window lose their color in the sun of a second spring. For literature there is one fast dye, one only, and that is style.

Of course an event can be permanently interesting, or an adventure, or an unfamiliar truth, suddenly driven home. But events recur, adventures have their parallel, new truths are apt to be the truths your grandfather got from his grandfather in a slightly different form. Style, on the other hand, is forever unique. It is personal as the nose on your face and cannot be duplicated. In truth it is the distillation of the writer’s mind, and if writing is precious, it is style that makes it so.

How little do the dictionaries know of this! I quote from the pachydermous Webster: Style is “the quality which gives distinctive excellence to artistic expression, consisting especially in the appropriateness and choiceness of relation between subject, medium, and form, and individualized by the temperamental characteristics of the artist.”

There you have it. Ye Gods and little fishes what a paradox! Webster’s “style” is the negation of style. You might as well define the iridescence of a moth’s wing by enumerating the chemical compounds of the capillary filaments that go to make it so. Style is the man, his aspiration and his limitation all in one. If he is a memorable man, his style will tell you of him through the ages.

Style varies with every temperament. Sometimes it is torrential, sometimes combative. Occasionally it is achieved through a certain parsimony in words. In a satirical passage understatement always tells. I chance on an excellent example in the opening sentence of a story by that intermittent and malformed genius, Ambrose Bierce.

“Early one June morning in 1872, I murdered my father — an act which made a deep impression on me at the time.”

Style varies with the man who makes it. The test is: will it make the author’s message stick like a burr in your memory? I quote an example that gives a gay twist to a solemn occasion. It must be twenty years ago that I read in a Missouri newspaper this lively account of an execution: —

At half-past five the trap was sprung and Thomas J. Mullov, dressed in a neat-fitting blue suit, a turndown collar and a black cravat, was ushered into the presence of his God.

Can you not see the man who wrote that; his felt hat clapped on one side of his head, a cigarette drooping from his lips, his sharp little intelligence squeezing the last drop of drama out of his opportunity? He put all newspaperdom into a single sentence. His may not have been the best style, but style he had and fit to be remembered.

Sensibly or insensibly, style ensnares every man who has a seeing eye for the printed page. It was a great event in my education when one day during my boyhood Matthew Arnold, master of the art, called on my mother. I remember to this day his introduction of his wife. “Mrs. Sedgwick,” he said, “let me present Mrs. Arnold, free from the taint of philanthropy.” The talk that followed bore much on style. Mr. Arnold remarked that Americans had a strain of poetry in their discourse. What Englishmen call the “sea” Americans call “ocean,” and for us “fall ” is apt to be “autumn”; both poetic words. But what lies deepest in my recollection is the horror Mr. Arnold expressed at the style of American newspapers. I must say he made his point. The Cincinnati Enquirer, a copy of which had fallen into his hands, had, and I believe still has, a curious custom of concentrating attention on its topmost headline by permitting a single word in enormous letters to fill the column. A tragedy similar to the one described by my Missouri friend had just been enacted, and the Enquirer headlined it thus: —

JERKED

TO JESUS

In Mr. Arnold’s opinion, it was the reporter, rather than the criminal, who deserved the noose, and doubtless in a more civilized America, his opinion would prevail.

Style, I think, is inseparable from personality. The works of Shakespeare are, of course, the supreme instance. Facts regarding his life, incredible as has been the industry in ferreting them out, are few enough. But the plays are there and the sonnets are there, the sympathies and prejudices, the loves and hates are there. However obscure the circumstance, the manner of man who wrote them could not be clearer had Titian drawn his portrait.

Let me take a more modest and casual instance. As I write these words, a paragraph from a book I am reading furnishes an example. Its author, one Reginald Farrer, an adventurous botanist, had been scaling the mountains of Tibet in search of rare and beautiful plants. That was about all I knew of him until I came to consider this paragraph, written while the horror of the first universal war rolled across half the world to his lonely mountain camp.

The stormy year now closes with comparative peace over exhausted China, and the blackest storm over Europe. It is something to have flower-fields and beauties to remember amid the enveloping universal darkness of the world. For the utmost griefs of beings, races, and continents come and pass, but the beauty of a poppy-petal on an alpine fell, the child of a day at the mercy of wind or hail, that has its hour and passes also, continues immortally recurring through the ages, outliving the crash of kingdoms and civilisations and their evanescent agonies. More and more deeply do flowers give consolation in the wreckage of life, and the heart of the gardener can never be wholly sad so long as the impregnable beauty of life goes on being born of the earth to which we all return. The sprouting little Crocus in spring is more King of eternity than the Kaisers; and the faith of a flower moves the mountains of the world.

There is beauty here, but beyond the beauty much may be told. Beneath the botanist is the man passionately in love with flowers and with the Nature that brings them into being, but it is love from within rather than admiration for what is without. The writer’s whole personality is merged with what he describes; his life an infinitesimal fraction of one infinite whole. The indivisible river of existence flows through him and all things else. There is no surprise when I look into another volume written by an associate of his and find that long before he wrote this passage Reginald Farrer accepted the Buddhist faith and the Buddhist philosophy.

I find comfort in remembering that death came to Farrer on one of his most distant expeditions. A man whose mind has ranged so far must have been envious of a lonely grave. Let his epitaph be written in lines, most beautiful perhaps among the works of women: —

The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling Can center both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

Every editor, of course, has his own method. I have heard it sworn to in New York in the old days, that Frank Munsey cabled the Pope direct, setting forth the influence of Munsey’s Magazine and inviting the Holy Father to contribute a paper on “Home Life in the Vatican,” and to put snap in it. Of that story I have my suspicion, but what an editor like Frank Munsey will not do to attract attention in the world, a quiet man shrinks from recording.

When correspondence with an author has been long continued and a certain specious friendship rests upon it, an editor gets to know the oddities and the quiddities which protect writers from the commonplace and give to each his place in the world. King Charles’s head is always to be kept in mind, and if the editor does not learn his lesson here below I sometimes think that when the time comes for his transfer to a higher sphere, he may find himself a semicelestial impresario with a galaxy of heavenly prima donnas to keep in hand. That should complete his training! As a contributor grows in importance and success, the editor’s touch must be lighter and more delicate. Discipline is relaxed and whims are indulged. But standards are standards, and I do not believe an editor should come to heel at any author’s whistle. I recall small but characteristic altercations with Mrs. Wharton. She lived in Paris and wrote by Jamesian standards. Her spelling and punctuation followed the English tradition. The Atlantic usage was its own but it followed the main currents of American practice. So it was that when the “u’s” were taken out of Mrs. Wharton’s “parlours” and “colours” and semicolons were substituted for her dashes, she altered to the original form every correction made in her galley proofs. It was very obvious that the Atlantic reader, noticing variant spelling and punctuation in the magazine, would ascribe the deviations simply to careless proofreading; and careless proofreading the editor abhorred. The issue was joined. Atlantic habits must be respected, but Mrs. Wharton was an artist and the work of artists must not be retouched. I pondered the question, printed the article precisely as the author demanded, and simply subjoined this footnote: —

In this story certain divergencies in spelling and punctuation from the established practice of the Atlantic are made at the request of the author.

Mrs. Wharton was irritated, but after all, she had had her woman’s way and the editor his professional satisfaction.

2

HALF — the top half—of the reading world is composed of women. That the editor never forgets. They are not the sugar frosting on his cake but an indispensable part of the batter and it behooves the chef to know the quality of his ingredients. Every editor looks through his astigmatic spectacles, but long ago my own beliefs coagulated. Now they are implastic.

Were I a good Catholic, I would take my stand on the consistent judgments of the Fathers for a dozen centuries. St. Chrysostom sums them up with moderation: “Woman is a desirable calamity.” But it is not fair for a heretic to hide behind alien fortifications. I appeal to history. In no field of competition has woman won a blue — except in the very territory that concerns us — writing. Even here half and more than half that field has been pre-empted by men. This is a singular and indicative fact. Sequestered through the centuries from other intellectual pursuits, the opportunity for writing has been wide open to woman. Through the single unobstructed gateway she has trooped singly and in regiments. It is absurd to think of her as a newcomer. If the domains of science and of philosophy have denied her entrance, wide provinces have for centuries been freely open for her to invade. Poetry, painting, and fiction have been at the beck of her choice.

In painting, to what women should we give the prize? To Madame Lebrun, a ribbon, but it must be red, not blue; to Rosa Bonheur, possibly an honorable mention for her virility; to Miss Cassatt only a red, though hers, I clearly admit, must be dyed a most brilliant vermilion.

Turn to poetry. Sappho, you say brightly, whether you have read her few hundred scattered lines or not. Next you pause, pause for some twentyfour centuries and then mutter, Christina Rossetti and Emily Brontë, both precious names and Emily’s, by virtue of two poems, immortal. Here I, too, pause in some amusement. Palgrave’s first Golden Treasury, thanks to the perfect pitch of the ear of Tennyson, who sat always at Palgrave’s elbow, is within its compass of an unrivaled excellence. It contains the names of seventy-nine men contributors and of live women: Anne Lindsay, Lady Nairn, Mary Lamb, Jane Elliott, and — Phoebus Apollo! — Mrs. Barbauld. These and not Emily Brontë! But even if you come to later years and pick up Mrs. Browning, if you must pick her up, and our own elfin Emily Dickinson, the scales are heavy against you. Women do have emotions and can express them. One would suppose the lyric certain to give them their ripest opportunity, but there the record stands.

Fiction remains, and in the domain of fiction woman makes her bid. All her resources of intelligence and enthusiasm, her patience, her delicate understanding of human nature, sluiced from closed regions of high endeavor, pour torrentially into the great reservoir of fiction. When women entered politics, Mr. Choate’s toast to the sex rose to the occasion. “Women, once our superiors, now our equals!” In politics the compliment, if compliment it was, was scarcely justified, for the addition of women to our voting lists has doubled the costs and complexities of our elections without changes in their fundamental outcome. We have multiplied our problems, but we have not multiplied the intelligence with which to solve them. In our immediate business, the writing of fiction, women, once our equals, are in a fair way to become our superiors. It is true they may lack the masterful hand with which great novelists like Conrad and Hardy create a human world shadowed by overarching Fate. They may not have the broad social sweep of a Lewis or even a Hemingway, but in the nicety of their observation of life, in their ingenuity, in the fidelity of their portrayal of human nature, they do not seem to me to take a second place.

Indeed, centuries before woman sat in the driver’s seat of the family car, her ancient servitude served her in good stead. When women, along with their chattels, were merely the property of men, they had to be observant, they had to be subtle, devious, and ingenious, they had to understand the ultimate springs of conduct. Such knowledge was their salvation, and now the training of their long indenture makes itself felt in their novels and their stories. They may not have the full vibrant intellectual energy, except in rare instances, but their instinct has a prehensile qualify, attaching itself to its object and like a lambent flame nursing it into life. The higher intellectual training oftentimes develops the brain at the expense of the instinct, and instinct is the primal source of woman’s power.

Mutabile Semper Feminal How axiomatic to men it seems, how prejudiced to women! But the whole philosophy of sex is based on the variableness of woman. She may not be the light quivering aspen of the poet, but to men she remains unpredictable. And this is not a modern bias&emdashindeed moderns are chivalrously disinclined to respect their convictions regarding women. It goes back to a remote past not only in the Western but in the Eastern world. Only yesterday I picked up a little figure of a Japanese god dating from the twelfth century. It was the familiar figure of Anzu Myro, a sort of Briareus with half a dozen arms whose special care is the emotional relation of the sexes. In his uppermost right hand Anzu clasps the thunderbolts of passion. In the lowered left is a bell. The thunderbolt represents the indestructible unchangeable masculine, the bell the feminine, eternally mutable, unchangingly changing. So it has been in men’s minds and so it will remain.

3

PROFESSIONS grow less personal in their relationships (witness the doctor and his patients, the lawyer and his clients) but an editor should keep his friendships in constant repair. But for my constant friend, the contributor, mine had been a companionless life.

During the 1890’s when I chanced to be on the scene, the glory of Harvard was her Department of Philosophy, and the glory of the Department of Philosophy was the hearty divergence in the creeds of one professor and the next. There seemed no focal point at which any philosophy touched any other. The planets wheeled each in its eccentric orbit with no sun to restrain them. One remembers the truth-telling snapshot of William James and Josiah Royce perched together atop a stone wall while tearing the universe apart. “Papa,” begged Peggy James, camera in hand, “don’t let him be so sober. Make him laugh.” James raised a monitory forefinger. “Damn the absolute!” he said just as the button was pressed, and now two laughing faces tell their philosophic story.

Two other memorable figures were members of the department: Santayana, the sceptical ironist who accepts the Catholic Church “except for its dogma” (which seems to me strikingly like accepting Heaven except for God), and Palmer, the classicist, child of the Puritans, whom at that time I thought of as a sort of Wesleyan minister, but after I had grown up, knew to be beloved among men.

Small-boned and fragile, with the gentlest of scholar’s faces, George Herbert Palmer walked about the Yard the symbol of benignity, but in the classroom his countenance would take on a quizzical expression as he sprang his trap and caught his student in the neatest of inconsistencies. His talk was full of fun with little sharp unexpected turns. Boys are sent to Harvard to grow up. Would that I had grown up and then been sent to Harvard! It was long after I was earning a living, even after that living ceased to be wholly precarious, that I really came to know Professor Palmer. He had made a translation of the Odyssey and a million copies of it had been sold. He had written the biography of his wife, Alice Freeman Palmer, President of Wellesley, with whom, being a professor at Harvard himself, he had lived a separate and loving life, and made of it a story unparalleled among domestic biographies. His books I read and delighted in, but not until I used to stay with him at Boxford did I understand the source of that delight.

Professor Palmer lived in his ancestral home, an epitome of New England. The chimney, he told me, was forty-four feet in girth and from its many facets an open fireplace warmed every room. Everything was in the strait tradition, simple and seemly. We strolled, my wife and I, over his wood lot where he took his exercise, chopping firewood just as he had chopped it when a boy. The conversation ranged through Homer, leapt the chasm to Milton and Marvell, and then exfoliated among the metaphysical poets, always coming to rest in the serenities of George Herbert, the saint whose name he bore and whose faith he practiced. In the evening he would take down a volume of Herbert and read aloud to us in his delicate and precise enunciation. Then before bed called us he would talk of the Puritans from whom he came. The Puritans! The very name has become a byword, yet even in its extreme dilution, where is the stock that gives a tougher element of strength and courage to the American conglomerate?

Friendship is a kaleidoscope and I think next of a man made in a very different pattern, William Beebe.

Certain critics maintain of Will Beebe that, while he talks science, he writes literature. I say, “Thank God for that!” Till he came down the jungle trail, hoatzins and iguanas, ithomiids, arid Scarletthighed Leaf-walkers lived amongst us in a desert of arid prose. Here is an artist who has given them the prismatic colors of poetry; and who can say they are less alive for that! One thinks of Brooklyn as safely prosaic, but Will was born there. Jules Verne was Ins fairy godfather and, with an injudicious mixture of G. A. Henty, presided over his youth. You can see their busy spirits at work in him to this day.

How much better is one passion than two! Will owes a single allegiance to the Creature Kingdom and looks on mankind as the least desirable species thereof. From his aeroplane in the First World War he caught a bird’s-eye view of men, found it unsuited to his tastes, and after an honorable discharge sought peace in the teeming jungle of Guiana. The pleasant somnolence of rest is anathema to him. Between expeditions he classifies, reflects, records, but his personal contentment is in direct relation to his proximity to the forest clearing or the ocean floor.

I am forever interested in what people regard as the summit of life’s satisfactions. The highest pinnacle of Beebe’s heaven is to lie in the spiky grass of a Sarawak jungle in an agonizing posture, prone on his belly, watching the behavior of pheasants in the mating season, while an army of ants devour him alive and a band of head-hunting Dyaks hover about, near enough to give a shimmer of danger to the atmosphere. Hardly second in his scale of felicities is to be lowered in his “bathysphere” at Nonsuch, Bermuda, three thousand and twenty-eight feet below the surface, and on ocean’s bottom to affront obscene creatures of the sea on ground of their own choosing. Beebe’s mightiest work has been his Monographs of the Pheasants in four volumes of sumptuous folio. Of these birds, the most exquisite work of Nature, there are in this round world nineteen groups: and nineteen of them the explorer caught by camera or gun and imprisoned in his book, closing forever one fascinating path of pioneer research. That journey took him seventeen months, during which he followed an iridescent trail from Java to the Vale of Kashmir. Of these magnificent books, ornithology is not the only reward. If it is beauty you seek, there are excelling photographs; there are exquisitely colored plates; and not infrequently the brilliant text will give you an idea of what the ultimate can be.

Three score and ten is near at hand for Will Beebe, but as I write, he is hurrying his departure on a new journey. Here’s happy hunting to him, a safe return, and another journey, and another, and still another before the last and longest!

4

IN the days when Boston was pleasantest, there lived here Lorin and Margaret Deland. The Good Book requires of married people that they twain shall be one flesh, and the union of Lorin and Margaret Deland was the perfect exemplification of that command. Divergent in talent, their friends thought of them as a single personality. She was a novelist who combined distinction with success, and he might best be called, perhaps, a broker in ideas. His was a most ingenious mind, not consecutive but extraordinarily illuminating. A cocktail of a mind it was. He would shake you up ideas for an advertising slogan, or devise an intricate and revolutionary maneuver for the Harvard football team, just as readily as he would map a campaign for Phillips Brooks and Trinity Church, plan a novel political reform, or reconstitute a charity. Lorin Deland never grew old following the beaten path, but he was no laggard. Witness his lively chronicle of his engagement to Margaret Campbell, as Mrs. Deland once was. She has left the record of it: —

At 5.00 P.M, - He arrived. She saw him from an upper window, getting out of the stage.

At 6.00 P.M. — Somebody introduced them, on the staircase.

At 6.30 P.M. — With the length of the supper table between them, they looked at each other occasionally.

At 7.30 P.M. — They met in the hotel parlor.

At 8.15 P.M. — He asked her to dance the Lancers.

At 9.00 P.M. — They sat on an ancient horsehair sofa, and talked of the weather.

At 9.30 P.M. — They fell in Love.

His life, all of it, was a good deal like that.

As young married people with a consolidated income of one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, the husband laid down these three rules:—

1st: Don’t want what you can’t afford.

2nd: Go without if you must — but never go in debt.

3rd: When you can’t have necessities and luxuries at the same time — give up two or three necessities and take a luxury.

As I transcribe this sagacious code I think of the wisest advice given to me as a young man just engaged and enjoying a salary not fifty cents too large for two: “Never keep accounts. They destroy your peace of mind. Never forget it is for happiness you are marrying.” In the teeth of the economists I pass on to others this salutary maxim.

The right career for Lorin Deland, at least so one friend thinks, would have been as a professional adviser in family perplexities. Industry has adopted the idea: why should not families enjoy it? In a riper world there would be room for such a career. But Lorin Deland was obliged to earn his dollars as the straighlener-out of business perplexities. His imagination would play about commercial problems, always using as its fulcrum his understanding of that cohesive bundle of contrarieties which we call human nature. Lorin Deland made that his lifelong study. Wherever he went ho carried with him an invisible willow wand, his dowser, which would bend double over the hidden springs of men’s desire.

5

SPACE fails me but not memory. I think of two men who between them perhaps have written more of the Atlantic than any half dozen others. Gamaliel Bradford, last of an austere and famous line, with a face sensitive and delicate as his “psychographs” of distinguished men, made no less than twenty-six contributions to the Atlantic. In style and a temper wholly opposite, the other most constant visitor to the magazine was Dallas Lore Sharp.

Sharp was an Evangelist, a lifelong preacher of the Gospel according to John Burroughs. For although his quenchless enthusiasm stemmed from Agassiz, it was from Oom John’s friendship that his inspiration came, from that and from a more exalted source, for he read his Bible with the zeal of a Covenanter. Every morning while oatmeal and pancakes grew visibly colder, the Patriarch (Sharp began Ins patriarchy about the age of twenty-one), Mrs. Sharp, and multitudinous young Sharps would read a chapter of Scripture, each taking an alternate verse. From Genesis to Revelations they would go and round the course again, permitting, as Sharp used to tell me, no verse however embarrassing to give them pause. The Sharp farm was on Mullein Hill, well within Boston’s radius of intellect. He reigned there, like Alexander Selkirk, observant monarch of all he surveyed, following with intensest interest the habits of God’s creatures. Not the wink of a rabbit’s eye escaped him nor the unfolding of a bud of the lesser celandine.

The breed of the New England naturalist, long may it survive! Torrey is gone, Bowles is gone, John Phillips is gone, Sharp is gone, but their spirit lives abroad in the land. Increasing year by year, Public Reservations praise them, bird sanctuaries acknowledge them, field, wood, and river consecrate their remembrance, and lovers of the open road, leaving behind the golf course scarring the face of Nature, make for the unfenced country, praising their name.

Yet in common gratitude I must speak of one friend more. Before my coming there presided over the Atlantic the Yankee embodiment of the humanities. It is muted praise that is most grateful to Professor Bliss Perry and I rise to greet him simply as Fisherman and Scholar. Which the obverse and which the reverse of the medal I can hardly say. Not that the wily trout actually whisks between him and his Emerson. Each has its season, and the debt of scholarship to angling has been too often and too eloquently proved for us to dispute it.

To be a Perry, father, son, or grandson — or a daughter of the Perry name for that matter — is to teach. As statesmanship in the Cecils, morality in the Adamses, swollen lips in the Hapsburgs, or politics with the Roosevelts, so teaching will run in the Perry family to the remotest generation. It is rumored, to be sure, there is a Perry in business, but that legendary exception proves the rule. Teaching is the Perry business. Chiron the centaur herding his young heroes, Mark Hopkins straddling his log, such is every Perry in the classroom; and in this day of crime committed in the name of education, thank God for that! I think with gratitude of Father Perry at Williams College teaching to all and sundry that morality and Free Trade are one and indivisible, and I can see his smiling face in Heaven.

To Bliss Perry I owe a personal and unpaid debt. For ten years he guided the Atlantic in the apostolic succession just before I came along, and if the tradition of convictions upheld with urbanity still survives in the magazine, the credit is all his.